The Big Bang Experiment

Scientists who are preparing to 'switch on' the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, have another thing coming their way. They are receiving death threats from critics who fear the smashing of protons - one of the building blocks of matter, to re-create conditions that existed at the time of the Big Bang will create a black hole which could spell end of the world much too sooner than prophecized !

A Large Hadron Collider (LHC), 12 stories high costing £5b is buried more than 300ft under the Alpine foothills in a 17mile tunnel along the Swiss-French border. In the flashes from the collisions inside the £5 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC), scientists expect to reproduce conditions that existed during the first billionth of a second after the Big Bang at the dawn of creation. Some of those working on the LHC have received threatening emails and worried phone calls from members of the public, who fear it could create a devastating black hole.

But Professor Brian Cox of Manchester University, who will be working on the ATLAS detector, responded angrily to doomsayers who have predicted an Armageddon.

'Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a t***,' he told The Telegraph.

Scientists could find answers to some of the biggest questions in physics, such as why the universe looks the way it does, and how to explain mass, gravity and mysterious 'dark matter'. They could also find the first evidence of extra spatial dimensions, and even create mini-black holes that blink in and out of existence in a fraction of a second.Professor Cox added: 'There's a kind of magic energy we've not been able to get to, and we know from previous experiments that's where things happen. Now for the first time, we'll be crossing that barrier.'

" The Large Hadron Collider will be 'switched on' this Wednesday, Sep 10th 2008, in hope to find the elusive god particle "